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Abstract

One of the crucial questions on the long-term consequences of immigration is whether dis-advantages experienced by immigrants are transferred to their children. In this study I present the first evidence on occupational class attainment among second-generation immi-grants in Norway. I ask whether second-generation immigrants gain access to advantaged positions in the social structure on par with their native majority peers. The focus is on the four largest national ancestry groups of non-Western second-generation immigrants in the birth cohorts 1965-1980, i.e. individuals of Indian, Pakistani, Turkish, and Vietnamese backgrounds. Using binary and multinomial logistic regression, I explore the impact of educational qualifications and social origin upon access to employment and occupational attainment. The dataset is drawn from official registers administered by Statistics Norway, made available by the research project Educational Careers: Attainment, Qualifications, and Transition to Work. The dataset (N=91,225) comprises the entire population of second-generation immigrants in the selected birth cohorts and a ten percent random sample of native majority individuals from each birth cohort, used as a reference category in the analyses. The employment status and occupational class positions of the individuals are measured in 2005/2006, using the EGP class schema.

I report results from three sets of empirical analyses. All analyses were conducted separately for men and women. First, I find that all groups, except Norwegian-Pakistani and Norwegian-Turkish women, experience equal or higher levels of access to advantaged positions in the service class when compared to native majority peers with similar social origin. This corroborates findings in previous research on educational attainment, which have documented patterns of upward intergenerational social mobility for some national ancestry groups. Second, all second-generation groups, except Norwegian-Indian women, experience lower chances of being employed when compared to native majority individuals with similar educational qualifications and social origin. Lastly, once employment is secured, I find that all second-generation immigrant groups experience equal – and, in some cases, higher – chances of occupying advantaged occupational positions when compared to native majority individuals with similar educational qualifications and social origins.

Although some barriers remain with respect to access to gainful employment, overall, the process of occupational stratification works similarly for second-generation immigrants and the native majority. An important implication is that to the extent that ethnic stratification in Norway is reproduced between generations, this mainly happens within the educational system and not in the labor market. Furthermore, the patterns documented are compared with studies of the labor-market position of second-generation immigrants in other Western European countries, found in a recent comparative volume using an analytical design that is emulated here. In this perspective, Norway is comparable to Sweden and Britain, which shows the smallest levels of ethnic labor-market disadvantage among the European countries included in that volume, i.e. second-generation immigrant groups of non-European ancestry primarily experience disadvantages with respect to unemployment.